Chantonner
by Mademise
Summary: KotW spoilers. Multichap, Lenka/Clarabelle. M for Language, Insinuation and erotism. Warnings for gore, torture and abusive dynamics.
1. Chapter 1

It is her first day here, and Lenka is not feeling particularly enthused.

She's always had these little flashes of her future, regardless of her state of mind. She sees things that come to be true, and things that don't, and things she has no way of knowing about. When she's stressed, though, they really, really do not help.

Her ears are flooded with the hum of fluorescent lights, and she sees monotony.

Tiny little lives. Shirts and ties, smiles and obeisance where should be knives. She sees daggers hidden in the pinprick-pupils of lying eyes and she can feel the malice sliding over her skin.

She feels stagnation. Arguments over the silliest things. Machinery that was the epitome of its inventor's life being forsaken, being degraded. She smells the unrest.

There's the sense of it stretching out into forever, almost. It's the only thing that reminds her that it's not happening _all right now_, insistent as the noise that's filling her head. Even when she gets away from it, she knows that it hasn't ended, just that it's let her go for a little while.

She feels it clutching about her shoulders as she goes about her day. It's her first day here, and she's already wishing it her last.

She stands in the bathroom, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Hates it. Hates how boring she looks. She hates the dullness in her eyes that looks like what she saw in the eternity moment that this morning brought along with caffeine deprivation and a distinct inclination to despising the world, and she hates the pale in her cheeks and she hates the clothes.

Shirt and tie. Smiles and obeisance where should be knives.

"You look all daggers." The comment is graceful, peacefully said, and something in Lenka panics because for all the world the person whose reflection is now slightly crowding the space of her own looks like a man, with broad shoulders and a wide jaw and hair that, while long, just doesn't really scream _female._ "Is aught the matter?"

"This is the women's bathroom," Lenka says, and her voice sounds like blades.

"And you don't think I'm a woman?" The eyes—short lashed and without maquillage, like the rest of the face, though gloriously pretty all the same—crinkle, or at least the skin around them. "Well, I suppose I'm not. I'm close enough, though."

And Lenka looks, she really looks, going beyond the perfunctory categorization that is how she gauges others, and still she does not see. Not really. "What do you mean?" she asks, and her voice is still harsh in her ears.

"I'm not a big fan of gender. Rest assured, though, that as far as society is concerned, I am female." Their lips curl into a kind of smile. They're thin lips, dark and expressive and they stretch broadly. They give no clues to Lenka, though it's not like she needs any, now that this individual is talking.

"What's your name?" Lenka asks. If it turns out that this person is in fact a man she is going to complain about it for all she's worth to whatever higher authority there is, despite her rather withdrawing nature.

"Clarabelle," is the answer, given calmly and smoothly by that voice which, regardless of its soothing properties, is in that kind of midrange where you can't really place it and Lenka's wondering if this will be entirely as bad as she's thinking.

She schools herself into a smile, turns now to face the other and says, simply, "It's very nice to meet you."

Clarabelle inclines her head gracefully. "And you, Miss…?"

"I'm Lenka Bazaar," she says. It's her first day here, and she doesn't think it's going too badly at all.

* * *

**A/N: I seem to write a lot about dead characters. I'm really not sure why that is.  
**

**~Mademise Morte, September 24, 2012.  
**


	2. Chapter 2

Lenka Bazaar is all kinds of things. Some of them are positive, some of them are negative, and many more can go either way, but one thing she will never fail to be is considerate.

It's sort of a curse, she is thinking savagely as she tidies her life away. The fact of her constant consideration, comparison, compartmentalization. She can't do a damn thing without thinking about it, and as nice as that might seem, it has never been good.

It doesn't help when she's trying to convince herself when she's doing the right thing, and after all, that really is where it should matter. But something's gone horribly wrong somewhere along the line and all her analysis shows her is the face of the girl who could have one day been her lover, who has probably not ever not been the love of her life, and the life that she could have if she weren't so set on doing this.

It's not like she doesn't know why she's going ahead with it anyway, of course. She knows that this is the best thing she can do for the people she loves, the people she loves on that level especially. She knows that this is going to be the best possible use of her life, and she knows that it is in fact going to consume her life and she knows, on any rational kind of level, that this is something she has to do.

It doesn't make it any easier.

_Clarabelle_. The name's stopped sounding like anything after all these years apart from _safety_, or _sanctity_, or possibly just _home_. The girl herself, with her charm and her mind and her strength and her complete and total wondrousness. She'll miss the world after a few decades away, Lenka knows, but she also knows that what she'll really be missing will be Clarabelle. It's a thought that stings, and she hasn't even left yet.

It's the perfect time to leave now. Clarabelle is visiting her cousins, Stentor and Civet, for the week. She's out of the country. It would be so simple to just disappear, leaving everything behind, because she'd never have to look Clarabelle in the eyes again and pretend that forever isn't impossible because their love should have been forever, would be forever if it weren't for this and something inside Lenka is falling apart.

She can't leave a note.

She'd have liked to, she thinks. Just a little thing. Three words, even, the ones she hasn't mustered up for her own pronouncement. _I love you_, she'd have left behind, in some way or another, and she'd have gone away and she wouldn't exactly have been overjoyed about it, but there would have been a sense of closure. That's not going to happen, though. It's not possible.

There's always the chance that she'd break into a million shards as she wrote those words, after all, and it's not one she'd be willing to take because she needs to do this, to keep the world safe like it never guarded her, or Clarabelle, or any of the other people that slipped through the cracks that reave existence. This is something she is going to do and so she slips out of the country in broad daylight, thinking about Clarabelle's everything and regretting it all and also not because this is something she's going to do and she'd damned well better get used to the idea.

She's always had these little flashes of her future. Painful little things that pull her away from the now to the maybe, or the probably, or the will. She's never had one she's wanted to disbelieve, to disprove, to defiantly fail to fulfill, as this.

Lenka Bazaar sees a future without Clarabelle, and it hurts.

* * *

**A/N: For optimal symmetry, there will now be two chapters that are vaguely from Clarabelle's perspective. However, one never quite knows when one is going to get carried away.  
**

**~Mademise Morte, September 24, 2012.  
**


	3. Chapter 3

Clarabelle has had the weekend from Hell and coming home to finding her life empty really does not help.

The Sanctuary is unhelpful in the extreme. Says Lenka's an adult, is capable. Says there's no sign of a struggle. Sends a detective, an acne-ridden boy with long hair to check for signs of magic. He finds none, but then Clarabelle doubts that he could find his own arse with two hands, and that's her being charitable. He misgenders her on his way out from the apartment, and in a way she's glad to see him go.

She walks through the empty house and looks for any indication she can find that Lenka's still alive and the best she can get is that there's nothing much to say that Lenka's dead. Everything's clean, untouched, but no more so than usual. There was no last-minute cleaning frenzy, though if Lenka wanted to disappear then of course there wouldn't have been, she was cleverer than that. Nothing is missing, not even the things she treasured the most.

Clarabelle checks the cupboards and there are no clothes missing. None at all. Rubbish disposal – the normal kind of thing. The kitchen, and here she breaks down.

Hunches over the table in the middle of the room, feels the cold of the marble slab and thinks about Lenka and the smell of baking bread and she feels so completely utterly drained because everything in the fridge is stocked except for the milk, but then the milk was never really stocked, and it just hits her that this is how the house would be if Lenka planned to leave without any trace at all and that Lenka is gone.

And Clarabelle has had the weekend from Hell, because she'd gone up to Ireland to see her cousins and found them in a morgue, not there to work, but to have their bodies rot because they are dead and she hadn't gotten the courtesy of the news because emergencies never are conducive to informing the next-of-kin, not that she was that for them because of course their mother still loved them, didn't disown them for daring to be human, and that realization wasn't a fun one. Their funeral wasn't either, rested instead forever as one of the interminable niceties of life that didn't feel at all like a nicety, not when it was sliding off her skin like burning oil.

And she'd gotten a job couched as a job offer except it really wasn't because it takes someone with no will to live to pass up an opportunity like that and Clarabelle is a lot of things but one thing she isn't is capable of lying to herself and she knows that a chance like this is what she's been working for her whole life or damned near close to it but of course that didn't stop the feeling of hollowness that assaulted her on the way home because uprooting herself from Lenka wasn't a nice idea. Being home and finding it gone, though, was quite possibly even worse.

Clarabelle has a list in her mind, now. Not even one formulating, but a complete, tabulated list of indisputable fact. She's going to need to cut her hair again, cut it so short that it can't disturb. She's going to have to reinvent herself because if there's one thing Kenspeckle Grouse is, it's traditional. She's going to have to clear the fridge and cancel Lenka's subscriptions because there's nothing worse than a life not tidied away.

She's going to have to move on and that hurts like anything and she thinks she knows the message Lenka would have tried to imprint on the floors of the apartment at the moment she left and Clarabelle kicks off her shoes and rests her feet on the ground and thinks, for one blinding moment, the words _I loved you_.

She doesn't get a response. She wasn't expecting to.

* * *

**A/N: For some weird reason I don't actually think I dislike Kenspeckle, as in I wouldn't ever list him in characters I disliked if asked or anything, but I keep portraying him as this complete and utter arsehole in my fic. Which is, you know. Odd.**

**~Mademise Morte, October 2, 2012.**


	4. Chapter 4

Clarabelle pins the butterfly hairpin into her fringe and her hands are shaking.

It was Lenka's trinket. She'd worn it often, to the side of her head where her hair tucked its way into tidiness, and it had caught the light and held it to her like a halo and Clarabelle had been prepared to spend the rest of her life worshipping Lenka like she was a goddess of some sort and it feels like a hollow gesture, moving into the shell left behind so nicely by the girl with the eyes that saw further than most.

It chills her. She wishes she weren't so weak, so willing to let the thought creep underneath her skin, and that thought just opens up the way to thinking that she shouldn't have let Lenka in so easily either and her hands are shaking so bad that she can't bring herself to continue getting on with her preparations for the day until she has peeled off her socks with her toes and pressed the soles of her feet into the floor and tried to feel like the world isn't spinning away from her.

Her hands slam onto the wood of her dressing table and her arms are shaking too and she doesn't feel anything but she stares into the mirror and that's a stab in the heart because she doesn't see anything there that looks right. There's her face, of course, but it's stuck in the trappings of everything she swore once that she'd never adopt again.

She stares at the butterfly and the butterfly looks dull.

In the kind of daze she forces herself into for family functions and dealing with either corpses or her superiors, she finishes getting dressed and put-together and as little ornamented as she thinks she can get away with, and she's still not wearing her shoes as she leaves her house, doesn't care if she spears her foot through the first wickedly rusty nail she comes across because there doesn't seem to be any point any more and every gleam of light is the shine of Lenka's eyes and every hunch-shouldered butch she sees is a reminder of what she's lost and she is mourning still, in these unfamiliar streets, in this situation that she's not entirely comfortable with yet, though of course she doesn't think it's one that she can reasonably get out of.

She wonders if Lenka thinks of her, wherever she is, and she doesn't for a moment doubt that Lenka's alive and well because there is no way that Lenka would allow herself to get into trouble without a fight, because Lenka was the toughest person Clarabelle ever knew, even if she didn't necessarily show it off to the world. She wonders what it would be like if Lenka had stayed. If they'd have had a future.

She wonders if there would ever have been a way they could have worked out. If the world would have become brighter after that one terrible weekend instead of its every light winking out. If something else, anything else, had happened.

The world is solid underneath her and the sun burns against the small of her neck because her hair is in two bunches now and she hates how it looks but it's better than cutting it thin and soft and girly, at least she can rearrange it now with no fuss, and it seems inconceivable that she and Lenka still live in the same world.

Every step is a wonder and a doubt and a complete and utter lack of will to go on and so she can't bring herself to care much when the car slams into her.

* * *

**A/N: I read an article once that talked about the boundaries of healthy and unhealthy relationships. I think this is turning out to have been a pretty unhealthy one so far.**

**~Mademise Morte, October 27, 2012.**


	5. Chapter 5

She opens her eyes and she sees a light so blinding it could be the sun if the sun only were fluorescent blue, and for one mad moment she is thinking about angels and sweet-faced girls with long eyelashes and high-collared shirts and she is thinking that she has found her way home, but then her eyes focus, and she realizes she's alone.

"You're lucky, you know." The voice is subdued, dusty, dry. "You're lucky that you were hit so close to here. Lucky that you still had so much magic in you. You might have wound up dead if it weren't for that. You're lucky that I'm a genius."

Clarabelle groans, low in her ribs, and she says, eloquently, "God."

"I'm Kenspeckle, actually." Her eyes are still trained on the ceiling and she'd never realized that fluorescent lighting makes a sound until Lenka happened, because Lenka had opened her world to a whole other dimension mapped over the same terrible places and the one victory she feels in her weak, soft limbs, laid ineffectual by her sides, is that she probably doesn't look pretty at all right now.

"Kenspeckle." Her voice sounds weak to her. "Shit. This was a terrible first day of work, wasn't it?"

"Week." His voice is clipped, polite. "You were unconscious for quite a while."

"_Jesus_." Her eyes slide closed and something inside her is curled up, shivering and fetal. She falls asleep…

… Wakes up and the world has lost its shine.

"I was awake before?" Her voice is higher than she remembers hearing it chime since she was eleven and she learned to speak with her whole throat. "It seems hazy." Distant. Dazy, and yet she isn't thinking this, her mind is blank, and all there is is the sound and the words that she didn't plan and the light above her head.

"Only to be expected," Kenspeckle says politely. "You should be able to stay up longer this time, though."

Muscle memories fizz their way up to the forefront of her mind, pinpricks and scalpel cuts and wound after wound. "I was hurt pretty bad, wasn't I?"

"You're fixed now," Kenspeckle tells her. "Mostly."

And his voice sounds like it's foretelling some kind of horrible news but she can't bring herself to ask, not that question, so she forces her mouth open and forms instead the words "Can I get up?" and there's a soft hum of agreement from him and she draws the strength from her core and pulls herself up. "Wow," she says, because she hurts like anything, and then her eyes latch onto Kenspeckle's.

He's lounging in an armchair that's patterned florally in a manner that she is pretty sure she would have objected to before now but she just can't bring herself to care about right now. The light winds about him oddly, like he's absorbing it, and terror clenches in her veins, tight and hot and horrible.

And she wants to run.

"Still hazy?" he asks, and she would have thought his tone sounded sympathetic except that it accompanies his face and she can't look at him without panicking.

"Kind of," she says. Her voice sounds wrong. The alarm bells in her head are a clamor.

"Wait a while. It will pass." He's tending to something with a syringe now. Needle. She's primed to kick, smash and generally fight her way out, but she's trying her best not to move. If she's compromised, she should know just how fucked she is.

"All-right," she says, and she stares at her hands. The calluses. Doesn't even vaguely remember incurring them.

* * *

**A/N: So, uh, this was planned to be four chapters long.**

**That's not going to happen.**

**~Mademise Morte, October 27, 2012.**


	6. Chapter 6

Clarabelle remembers as she stares into the light that bounces off the scalpel. She remembers the first time she met Lenka, remembers the world they carved out for themselves. Remembers days of fluorescent lighting and broken photocopiers.

She remembers the car, and so she brings her memories back to Lenka because Lenka was a better memory.

The person Clarabelle is now little resembles the one that spoke to Lenka that first day. Her hair, long then and neat and straight, is short now, curls around her face. She is wearing cosmetics on her face and traditionally feminine clothes, not entirely of her own volition, and she holds herself with a great deal less pride. There was a time when Clarabelle had walked with confidence. No longer.

It's been years since Lenka's disappearance, years more since the last time Clarabelle was an isolate being. She doesn't enjoy the sensation any more now than she did before. It's not like she's lost much, being here in Kenspeckle's domain, friendless and unloved, because in the time that preceded Lenka, she had been without relation and fond acquaintance alike, and when she had Lenka, there had never been a need for anyone else. She supposes there still isn't one, though; there is no one else in this world, she thinks, who could replace Lenka.

"Clarabelle," Kenspeckle says as he enters the room, and she sets down the scalpel hurriedly, fingers clumsy enough that she slices through the skin of her palm on its way down. "What are you doing?"

She looks at him and sees the reason why she would rather be alone than anything else. "Carving practice," she answers in the high, horrible voice that grates in her ears still.

"Put that aside," he tells her, sharply, and his voice is neither low nor high, like hers had been once upon a time, but hers had never been so goddamn brittle. "Clean your cut, and then I've a chore for you."

She looks dully down at her hand, moving her whole head along with her eyes, tucks in her chin to regard the wound carefully. She walks to the sink, turns the tap to find it non-functional. "It doesn't work," she tells him, and he looks irritable.

"Whose fault is that?" he asks of her. "Who is meant to maintain this building and everything within?"

"I am," she answers, automatic, answer built in to her throat.

"Who is at fault?" he asks, his voice dangerously soft.

"I am," she repeats, the words tearing out of her like bullets, so she grabs a bottle of disinfectant and slowly pours its contents out onto the gash torn in her flesh, blinking away tears so she can see clearer. It stings, burns, hurts the inside of her so bad she wants to peel her skin off inch by inch.

"That's a waste of resources," he comments when she returns the bottle and dabs her hand dry with a cloth. "You owe even more now."

"I know," she responds, on autopilot through the pain. "What is the chore?"

He picks up two test-tubes from a table. "This contains deadly poison," he says calmly, indicating one, "and this one contains a poison that will be neutralized at sunset. You will have nothing else to drink for the rest of the day. I'll give you another two then. If you forget which is which, if you try to drink earlier, if you lose the safe one, then you will die. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she says. She takes them from him. "Left safe," she says, "right unsafe."

A moment later, she can't tell her left from her right.

* * *

**A/N: I've figured out why I really don't like Kenspeckle.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 19, 2012.**


	7. Chapter 7

Left is safe and right is unsafe.

She's staring at her hands like they're foreign entities. Her fingers are curled around the glass of the containers, curled tight and she remembers a long conversation with one of her cousins when she was younger. He had told her about being in school and having pencils thrown at him. She had told him that she was homeschooled so she wouldn't know, but she'd have broken the pencils and thrown them right back.

He had laughed and told her that he had friends who did that. All boys. He'd teased her about being secretly a boy, and she told him she wished.

It could all have been so easy, had she been simply one thing or another: girl or boy, anything would have been less of a struggle than the simple, aching truth that was the fact that she was neither.

Left unsafe and right unsafe because in a world of extremes, there is no such thing as solace.

The glass is unbreakable, she knows, because even though she shouldn't break it, even though that would be suicide, right now she doesn't feel like destruction would be too much of a let-down. But the glass is unbreakable, at least to the muscle of her hands, and that is a disappointment.

She's gone numb, retreated into her head as if she wasn't already there, always, and she's thinking about how she doesn't live anymore, how you can't rape the willing and can't murder the dead and right now she's a lot closer to a corpse than she is the person who she had been around Lenka.

She wishes, not for the first time, that the car had just killed her, except that she has the creeping suspicion that it did. There are reasons why she hadn't hesitated for as much as a moment when Kenspeckle had made the job offer, and though she doesn't hear them now, there have always been rumors floating around. Nye isn't the only doctor trying to raise the dead, and everyone knows Nye and Grouse are in competition.

Two wrongs don't make a right but three lefts do so perhaps she should drink three sips of the left liquid.

She wonders what would have happened if it had been the Nye that had offered her a living, had found her on the street that day. She bets she wouldn't be dressed the way she is, accoutered the way she is, holding poison in her bleeding palm the way she is. The Nye, for all its faults, would have understood her, she thinks. Would have understood about the gender and the aloneness and the brutality of being isolate in a world of friends.

Perhaps she could have shed the pronouns, shrugged them off like a weight, and perhaps she would have been able to fly with her shoulders set free. Perhaps she could have achieved something with her life, something more than what she has now. Perhaps.

What she does have, though, is an aching kind of thirst that has overtaken her mental processes and stripped her to a single raw nerve ending that is ready to scream, so she stops thinking, like that could ever help. Like anything could ever help her in this world where she had always thought she was destined to be alone.

Right is safe and left is unsafe, and she has stopped caring which way is left and which is right because it doesn't matter and she doesn't even know if she wants the poison or the purity at this moment, so uncaring, she drinks.

* * *

**A/N: I'm not really sure what to say here.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 19, 2012.**


	8. Chapter 8

Clarabelle returns to consciousness abruptly, painfully. She looks at her hands, sees test-tubes empty, and she removes recollection of the events surrounding them from her thinking mind, as she has every morning for so long. She doesn't want to deal with those.

"Do you know what these are?" rings out the question in Kenspeckle's voice so Clarabelle unfocuses and moves her eyes until she finds his form, and then she concentrates on seeing him and not screaming.

He is holding more glass containers, so she nods. "I washed those yesterday," she says simply. "They live in the cupboard under the sterilization sink."

"Do you know what they contain?" he asks, rolling his eyes.

"Looks like water," she says.

"They contain a deadly poison," he tells her. "One will be neutralized at sundown."

"Why?" she asks, involuntary response, shoulders sloping weak in the aftermath.

"Because that's how long it takes for the ingredients in it to finish reacting with each other," Kenspeckle says, the _obviously_unspoken.

"Why?" she repeats blindly, and cold is lining itself up against her nerves, shunting down her spine, and her head feels like so much hollow. "Why was that car there on that day and why am I alive now and why does my voice sound wrong and why are you trying to kill me and why am I alive now and why are my cousins dead and why is Lenka not here and why don't I remember anything anymore and _why am I alive now_?"

"What are you talking about?" Kenspeckle counters, his tone reasonable, even. "You're hysterical – only to be expected, I suppose, considering your karyotype. You're delusional."

"No, Kenspeckle," she breaths lightly. "I am not. There are some things that the world cannot take away from me, and God knows how it has tried—how you have tried—and Lenka is one of those things and I can still remember her like I remember where I left my limbs." She grins, tight and wide and distracting while her fingers scrabble out onto the table behind her. "I remember life with her like falling in love, like the world aligning itself for one blinding moment of perfection. I remember what it was like to live a life intact, and this is not it."

"You are unbalanced," Kenspeckle tells her, moving closer to her, and her eyes are fixed on the syringe he scoops up on his way. "You need help."

"And, what, you think you're the person to give it to me?" she asks, standing still now, hoping that just for once, things will go the right way. "You think that you're the one that needs to help me?"

"Clarabelle—" he begins, a warning in his voice, but it's too late for any kind of warning for him because she has been primed and ready to hurt for years now, buzzing with a need that she should have known sooner, or so she thinks, and so she cuts, lashes out with the scalpels until she has removed from him every trace of the man who had been her torment.

She listens to the dripping of his blood, after that, thinks about what she has done. The insanity she has ended. She thinks about all the people she saw, she met, distantly, through a cloud, when she was under his control. She thinks about how her cousins were dead then alive then dead once more and she thinks she might belong dead, but that doesn't matter because she feels more alive now than she has since Lenka.

She listens to the dripping of his blood, and she smiles.

* * *

**A/N: The timelines in this story are kind of a horrible mess. I'll have to try and even that out at some point.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 29, 2012.**


End file.
